The Shallowness and Inaccuracy of the Common Anti-Religious Arguments

Some opponents of religion throughout the Internet are always busy making fun of literalist Christians who believe that the earth was created in six earth days and that humanity is only around six thousand years old. These are really weird beliefs in this day of ours. However, the conclusion that the opponents of all religion jump to based on these people’s overly anti-scientific beliefs is another mental and logical oddity. They may deny that this is their intention: but in actual effect, by making fun of the literalist Christians all the time and hence by keeping their beliefs constantly in the forefront, they try to conclude that then all forms of religion must be nonsensical falsehoods. What an illogical way of proving your case…

A literalist Biblical faith is not the only faith possible. Even not all fundamentalist Christians believe such numbers to be literal. Thus when you make fun of such people, you are making fun of that particular individual and those who think like him. You are just entertaining yourselves and pampering yourselves concerning the way you approach monotheism. The religion that we believe is authentic God-revealed religion thus remains untouched by the things you say. In other words, you deceive yourselves.

As for me, I am a Muslim who believes in the Qur’an and the rigorously authenticated sayings (sing. hadith, pl. ahadith) of the Prophet Muhammad (May God bless him and give him blissful security). Neither the Qur’an nor the authentic sayings of the blessed Prophet include a passage which tells us that humanity is only around six thousand years old. Only some inauthentic reports of hadith include such a claim. These are almost beyond doubt forgeries introduced to a few Muslim circles in the first and second centuries after the Prophet, by some ex-Christians and ex-Jews who could not help incorporating their old tradition of story-telling into their new religion too. These are terminologically “weak hadith reports” attributed to the Prophet but not belonging to him, not only in the view of the present-day Muslims who know some science but according to the masters of the study of the methodology of hadith who lived over a millenium plus two hundred years ago, at some period quite close to the Prophet’s lifetime. Hence, Islam doesn’t endorse the unambiguously unscientific and false view that humanity is only around six thousand years old now. On the contrary, quite an authentic hadith states that around 224, 000 prophets (124, 000 in another report) have lived since the first prophet and first human being called Adam. This implies a huge time span for human history indeed, thereby agreeing roughly with the latest scientific findings that humans (including the so-called homo erectus people and various later human types) have been around for 2 million years.

As for the universe’s having been created in six days by God, the Qur’an does mention that He created the universe, including the earth and the heavens, in six days: However, it is clear from various verses of the Qur’an that the six days are not necessarily six earth days as we know them at all. Please continue to read here my mention and then quotation of the magnificent verses which prove that the concept of a “day” in the Quran is quite a relative one, which may point to a time span covering thousands or more of years.

In one verse, the Qur’an mentions a day which lasts 1000 years1 by our (humans’) way of calculating time and in another verse it mentions a day that lasts 50 000 years2. Therefore, we infer from such verses of the Qur’an itself that the six days of the creation of the universe need not be literally six days the way we count time. Each of them are thus very likely to be thousands, millions, billions of years.

Dear deniers of religion, you may find a lot of holes rightly or wrongly in almost every person’s religious beliefs. But at the basis of everything, there is the question whether all this meaning, life and love that we perceive in the universe around us can stem from a meaningless, lifeless and loveless nonsense, i.e. the unconscious material universe. The answer is a definite no.

Then the second fundamental question is whether all this meaning, love and life will just cease to exist one day without returning ever again and will cause all the past lives which we used to experience so vividly to seem in the end like a meaningless hoax, a strange hoax that was played by nobody…

Reality is a serious thing. It doesn’t play hoaxes. Nothing will just cease to exist for eternity and our lives are not a meaningless hoax. Think and you will realize it. The lifeless, purposeless, unconscious material universe didn’t create meaning, life and love. Material universe itself and we living beings were therefore created by a conscious, powerful and good creator, who necessarily cares about His creatures dearly enough to sent messengers into them in order to guide them and prevent them from despairing of the life after death.

We believers have always called Him God or Yahweh or Allah etc. Not only His direct messages to humankind through His messengers but the very logic and reason that He bestowed on us from birth tells us this: God or Allah, i.e. the Ultimate Reality, will prove us that He played no hoax on us in this life of ours and therefore He will re-create us on the Judgement Day for a better universe. He has already proven that to us theoretically as I’ve been trying to make clear in this post. The proof on the Judgment Day will be the practical one. This is indeed the truth and only those who listen in order to really understand can receive the message of the truth correctly.

Footnotes:

1Qur’an 32:5 – He rules (all) affairs from the heavens to the earth: in the end will (all affairs) go up to Him, on a Day, the space whereof will be (as) a thousand years of your reckoning.

2Qur’an 70:4 – The angels and the spirit ascend unto him in a Day the measure whereof is (as) fifty thousand years.

Both translations are from the famous translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali.

3 Responses to “The Shallowness and Inaccuracy of the Common Anti-Religious Arguments”

A hoax? It’s not a hoax if you actually believe it. I do not believe in god (yours or others). The Qur’an is loosely based on the Judeo-Christian bible as you can attest to (the 1000 yrs = 1 day). The Christian (New Testament is based on the older books of the Old Testament…the old testament has elements of a people transforming and struggling with polytheism and adjusting to monotheism…which in turn has babylonian and sumerian influences. Abraham’s father was from te Sumerian town of Ur and Abraham’s father was a High Priest there (this is found in the bible) which tells me other religions are admittedly in existence even in “scripture” time.

I don’t think of this as making fun of people. I look at it as my job to uncover to those who believe that there simply is no Santa Claus.

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The Qur’an comes from the same Divine source as the Bible including the New Testament part as well as the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew scriptures. This is the real reason for the similarities. However, the Qur’an is exceptionally free from the corruptions made in the Bible by those who held vested interests in making changes in it. The Bible as people have it today is only partially of Divine origin, and we don’t know exactly which parts are authentic and which are not. But the Qur’an is partly a criterion with which we can differentiate the true Biblical teachings that are still continued today from the corrupted false ones. The same is not exactly true about the hadith literature which contains lots of inauthentic material attributed to the Prophet (God bless him and give him blissful security). However, the study of hadith methodology and its principles still continue to guide us in separating the authentic material from the inauthentic, mostly based on the reliability of the “reporters” as first orally transmitted and then written down by the hadith-methodologists in the eighth and mostly ninth centuries C.E.

I also have read about the constant struggle between the so-called “Yahwists” i.e. the Prophets (blissful security be on them all) joined by their believers and the pro-polytheistic faction until quite late in Israelite history…